Slideshows: also in investigative journalism

The biggest worry of a presenter is to bore her audience. The biggest worry of the journalist is for readers to skip her article. Interesting visuals can be a solution for both challenges.

Investigative journalists are a special breed of news writers, they rely on their own original research (time consuming) and the end result is often a story with nuances that requires more words than the average newspaper article. There is pressure to summarize the article into something that does not do justice to the effort that was put in: news media budgets are under pressure, and the attention span of readers gets shorter and shorter.

Journalist Bill Dedman tried a slideshow on msnbc.com (here), read an interview about the project here on PoynterOnline. The text in his slideshow is 2,788 words, a typical article like this would get 600,000 readers for page one and 10% for the following pages. This report got almost 80m online views.

The use of slideware is no longer limited to supporting live presentations. It is a powerful and under-utilized alternative for web content/blog posts as well.